About Brent Huston

I am the CEO of MicroSolved, Inc. and a security evangelist. I have spent the last 20+ years working to make the Internet safer for everyone on a global scale. I believe the Internet has the capability to contribute to the next great leap for mankind, and I want to help make that happen!

Using ProFTPd for Core Processing Anywhere?

If so, you might want to pay attention to this announcement of a critical remote vulnerability in the daemon. You can read the alert here. A patch is now available and should be applied quickly if you have core processes using this application.

No authentication is required and it is a pretty straight forward buffer overflow, so exploit code should be easy to design and use. Common framework exploits are expected shortly.

Usually ProFTPd is used as a part of core processing, data warehousing and other heavy data processing solutions across a variety of platforms and industries. You can find installations remotely using nmap -sV scans on your network. Nmap is pretty good at identifying ProFTPd installs.

HoneyPoint users might want to consider deploying port 21/tcp (ftp) listeners to watch for scans for vulnerable servers by attackers. Detected scanning IPs should be investigated on internal networks and black holed on Internet facing segments.

Great article on File Crypto Tools

I saw this excellent article this morning that covers 5 basic tools for doing file cryptography across platforms. Many of these tools are great solutions and we use them frequently with clients. In particular, we find True Crypt to be a very powerful and useful tool. Many client have embraced this solution for laptop encryption, leveraging the free price and benefit for compliance.

You can read more about these tools here.

Check them out and use the ones that fit your needs in your organization. They are great tools for keeping your business, your business.

Keep Your Eyes on This Adobe 0-Day

A new Adobe exploit is circulating via Flash movies in the last day or so. Looks like the vulnerability is present across many Adobe products and can be exploited on Android, Linux, Windows and OS X.

Here is a link to the Dark Reading article about the issue.

You can also find the Adobe official alert here.

As this matures and evolves and gets patched, it is a good time to double check your patching process for workstation and server 3rd party software. That should now be a regular patching process like your ongoing operating system patches at this point. If not, then it is time to make it so.

Users of HoneyPoint Wasp should be able to easily any systems compromised via this attack vector using the white listing detection mechanism. Keep a closer than usual eye out for suspicious new processes running on workstations until the organization has applied the patch across the workstation environment.

MSI Partner Syhunt Brings Source Code Scanning to ASP & JSP

Syhunt has launched a very nice and powerful new edition of their Sandcat web application security tool. Sandcat is an extremely thorough and very capable assessment engine for web servers, web applications and web application source code. MSI has been using the tool for many years and we enjoy a very close relationship with the team behind the tool.

In addition to adding new features to the PHP source code scanning, this new release gives users the new capability to do white box testing on web applications for XSS vulnerabilities beyond PHP. The new version now includes cross site scripting checks for classic ASP, ASP.NET and JSP (JavaServer Pages) code modules. Syhunt even plans to further extend the classes of checks in those languages in the coming months. As with PHP source code assessment, this is a very powerful tool for increasing the quality and security of web applications, both new and legacy, around the enterprise.

Check out the new release at http://www.syhunt.com and let them know you heard it about from MSI. The Syhunt team are nice folks and they work very hard to bring you one of the most flexible, powerful and easy to use web application tools on the planet. Give it a shot, we think you’ll become a huge fan too!

Better Detection on the Desktops is Now Available!

Gang, as we have been talking about for several months, MicroSolved is proud to announce the immediate availability of HoneyPoint Wasp. Version 1.00 of this new tool focused on detecting compromised workstations and Windows servers is now running full speed ahead. Clients and participants in the beta program have had some great things to say about the product, like:

“It’s a no-brainer!”, “…deeply extends visibility into the desktop world…” and “Immensely helpful!”

For more information about how Wasp can help you defend your desktops and workstations, plus play a critical role in identifying attacks against Windows servers, check out the press release, web page or give us a call at (614) 351-1237 to set up a briefing!

SAMBA Vuln Could Be Dangerous

If you are not already looking at the newest SAMBA issue, you should be paying attention. It is a stack-based buffer overflow, exploitable remotely without credentials. The MetaSploit folks are already hard at work on an exploit and some versions are rumored to be floating about the underground.

The vulnerability exists in OS X, Linux and a variety of appliance platforms using the core SAMBA code. Updates are starting to roll into the primary distributions and OS images. Ubuntu, for example, already has a fixed version available.

You can read the SAMBA folks release here for more information.

Likely, wide scale exploitation is on the horizon and malware/worm development is also predicted for this particular issue.

In terms of actions, begin to understand where SAMBA is used in your environment, reduce your attack surfaces as much as possible, implement the patches where available and increase your vigilance on SAMBA utilizing systems/processes.

Keep your eyes on this one. With this also being a fairly heavy/serious Microsoft patch day, your security team and admins might be focused on other things. You don’t want this one to slip through the cracks.

HoneyPoint Wasp is Almost Ready to Leave the Nest

As many of you may know, the MSI team has been hard at work the last several months finishing the beta of our new compromised workstation detection product, HoneyPoint Wasp. It is a fully integrated component of HoneyPoint Security Server, capable of executing distributed detection and threat monitoring on Windows workstations across enterprises. The initial feedback by the beta group have been absolutely amazing. We are finding bots, malware and compromised hosts in a variety of locations, once thought to be “clean” and “safe”.

Wasp accomplishes this mission by being deployed as a service on workstations and by monitoring for the most common signs of compromise. It can watch for changes in the users, admins, port postures and such. It does white list detection of the running processes and it is even capable of detecting DNS tampering and changes to selected files on the operating system.

Even better, it does this work without the need for workstation event logs, signature updates or tuning. It “learns” about the workstation on which it is deployed and adapts its detection techniques to focus on important changes over the long run.

We designed Wasp to be easy to install, easy to manage and to be transparent to the end – user. As such, it is deployed as a 0-interface piece of software. There are no pop-ups, no GUI and no interaction at all with the user. All alerts are routed to the HoneyPoint console and the security team, eliminating any chance of increased help desk calls, user push back and confusion.

In the next couple of weeks, we will be making some announcements about the general availability of the Wasp product. I hope you will join me in my excitement when we announce this launch. In the meantime, think about what you are doing today to protect against initial stage compromises and congratulate the MSI development team and our beta testers on a job well done. I think you are going to be amazed at how easy, capable and advanced Wasp is, when it is released. I know I continue to be amazed at what it is detecting and how much stuff has evaded current detection techniques.

In the meantime, while we await the full release, check out this PDF for some more information about where we are going with Wasp and our HoneyPoint product line. I think you are going to like the diagrams and the explanations. If you would like to book a special sneak preview of Wasp and the rest of HoneyPoint, give your account executive a call. We will be happy to sit down and discuss it with you. As always, thanks for reading!

Excellent Source for Metrics on PHP RFI

My friend Eric has put up some excellent statistics and metrics on PHP RFI attacks against his honeynet. This is some excellent data. If you have read other stuff we have pointed to from Eric, then you know what to expect. But, if you are interested in a real world look at trends and metrics around PHP exposures, give this a few moments of your time.

You can find the interface and metrics set here.

Check it out, I think you’ll be impressed. Thanks, as always, to Eric and other folks in the honeypot community for all of their hard work, time and attention.

If you have some honeypot metrics to share, drop a comment below! As always, thanks for reading!

Looking For More Info on SEIM Best Practices?

I know we get a lot of questions on SEIM tools, their use and the best practices around their deployment and I have talked heavily to some of the folks involved in this SANS webcast tomorrow. If you have an interest in SEIM, I urge you to tune in.

You can find the details here.

They got some excellent folks to participate and the content should be quite strong. As always, if you have questions on SEIM deployments, products or use, drop me a line. Always happy to give my 2 cents.

PS – Special thanks to Scott Gordon for putting this together. I am sorry I could’t personally participate, but it is a very cool thing to bring to the community!

Using Honeypots to Track Attackers: Eric Romang’s FileAve.com Report

One of MSI’s Twitter friends, Eric Romang, recently wrote a deep dive about PHP RFI attacks that used the fileave.com service. The write-up was based on a large set of honeypot data that dates back several years!

The data is interesting and compelling and goes a long way to show value derived from the use of honeypots to track attackers and reveal information and trends about their behaviors. Check out this article here.

We were quite impressed with the data visualizations and are excited to see the level of effort put forth. Thanks for the dedication and hard work! We hope that, you, our readers, enjoy pointers to great data like this.

Have you seen or done other honeypot research or visualizations on your networks and threats? If you care to share tips, results or the like, drop us a line below in the comments or via Twitter (@lbhuston, @mrmaguire). We would love to hear more about them!

As always, thanks for reading!